About civilization and other miscellaneous
This is fascinating stuff - parts of it are somewhat disturbing, too, as I'm sure you intended. Still, the ugliest aspects of Antarctic civilizations aren't too implausible, given that many of them have parallels (though usually less severe) in real life OTL cultures. ---- I do think that the speed of development (with some major developments happening earlier in Antarctica than anywhere else on earth) is unlikely, as is the number of plants and animals that are suitable for domestication (OTL Australia is only a little smaller than Antarctica, and it has very few plants and no animals that were ever domesticated either by its natives or by later settler populations), but I guess it's not impossible. - Agriculture developed earlier in Australia than anywhere else because of the intense seasonality of the environment. Even the Inuit of the Canadian and Alaskan arctic have winter food sources. Winter food sources in the Antarctic environment declines precipitously and is very hard to access. The only viable year round food environment was the coasts but the early Tsalal technology wasn't up to the task. In North America it took inuit and pre-inuit cultures thousands of years to master the technology of the arctic shores. Antarctic hunter/gatherer cultures were strongly biased towards intensive hoarding and storage to get through the winters, supplemented by cannibalism and famine of course. The intense seasonality biased early Tsalal towards some of the cultural traits which lead to agriculture. The other factor was that Antarctica's intense seasonality also affected the plant biology. Lots of root storage plants, and lots of extremely specifically seasonal berries and seeds. Essentially, there were several lines of plants which were seasonally habituated to producing biological surplus in tissues or seeds and to manifesting that surplus at very specific periods during the season. So this is the other side of it. Biologically and culturally, Antarctica was predisposed to Agriculture in ways that Australia was not. In any event, the lead time for Agriculture seems to have a lot of flexibility. Old world humans were around for a hundred thousand years in Europe and the Middle East before Agriculture, approximately 12,000 years ago. Humans seem to have passed into India and China 70,000 years ago, but independently developed Agriculture almost contemporaneously. 12,000 to 9,000 years ago. Papuan habitation of New Guineau begins maybe 50,000 years ago, and agriculture is invented 7,000 years ago - roughly two or three times as fast, proportionately, as the rest of Eurasia and in a much smaller area. Mesoamerican agriculture develops 6,000 years ago, and Andean agriculture 5,000 years ago, but astonishingly, the New World is only settled roughly 11,000 to 12,000 years ago, or literally within 5,000 years of moving in! Given these ranges, the Tsalal could hypothetically have developed agriculture anywhere between 5,000 years (as in MesoAmerica) after colonization or over 30,000 years ago. Or as late as a few thousand years ago (assuming that Papuan or other Asian models apply) or never (as in Australia). Given the Antarcican situation, my expectation was that Agriculture would show up earlier rather than later. Exactly when is somewhat arbitrary, I didn't want to go too early. But it seemed to me that 18,000 years ago was a justifiable time frame, and that with an early agricultural period of 10,000 years (plus the later human era) once it got going, every possible cultivar would have been found and exploited. The 'speed of development' once initial agriculture begins is hardly breakneck. It actually proceeds rather slowly. The Tsalal have lots of ups and downs. Whereas in Meso America, the Andes, the Indus, Mesopotamia etc. agriculture gets followed up by civilization pretty fast - ie within a few thousand years. For the Tsalal, it takes a lot longer. The Middle Era of Agriculture lasts about 10,000 years, with civilizations only emerging in the later part of that. Even within the Later Era, civilization, we spend over 3500 years in a kind of neolithic coal age. I'd argue that the Tsalal's progress is often slow. But then, they're alone on the continent, and there's not a lot of potential exchanges back and forth as in EurAsiAfrica. Population is lower, less mobile. Some things will happen quicker - gunpowder shows up a lot earlier. But gunpowder is a freak adventure that could come up anytime in human history. Overall, I don't see it as more rapid, just happening differently. In respect of animals - the big difference between Australia and Antarctica was that Antarctica had the benefit of an additional 20 million years of contact with South America. More opportunity for more mammal diversity, and some interesting choices. More mammal lines gave us primates, liptoterns, edentates, pyrotheres, astropotheres, in addition to marsupials and monotremes. Looking at animal domestication elsewhere, one thing that's remarkable is how quickly it follows after agriculture. We have relatively independent domestications of oxen, water buffalo, goats, pigs, dogs, horse, camel and llama, and semi-domestication of moose, reindeer and elephants. That's just draft animals whose labour is used for carrying or hauling. Semi-domestication of elephants takes place independently at least four times, which is amazing. Semi-domestication of reindeer takes place in Europe, and I'd argue that the potential was there in North America, if the right cultural factors had come into play. Moose are an interested example of aborted domestication in Europe, and would arguably have been in play in north America, again if the right cultural factors had come into play. Applying this to Antarctica called for a certain number of arbitrary decisions. Given the human tendency towards local population crashes, I assumed that megafauna would be able to survive in proximity to humans long enough for domestication to be an option. That's not always the case. Most times, civlizations hunt out their local megafauna before domestication. This explains why domestications tend to occur on hinterlands. I could speculate as to the spectrum and likely outcomes of big herbivores of Antarctica, but not necessarily as to their social or behavioural traits, or how amenable those traits would be to domestication. So it came down to making guesses and flipping coins, based on what we know of other domestications and other species. Sloths, I assumed to be moderately social, given size, slowness and relative immunity from predation, and their success in north America suggested that they'd be successful in adapting to winters. Their lifestyle in winter would amount to digging up roots and grasses with claws, comes naturally with the claws, a lifestyle that they might well have exhibited in North America. As big powerful animals, I assumed some kind of social structure and patterns of social dominance and submission. So I borrowed the analogous traits from water buffalo, and threw in water buffalo's propensity for shoving matches. The predisposition to digging up roots with big claws is a valuable behaviour for domestication, if this is a crop you need. It's completely an arbitrary choice, but I felt a case could be made for giant sloths as viable domesticates. Besides, the visual image of men riding sloths the size of horses or elephants was just too cool. As I said, arbitrary but I think justifiable. Mothbeasts were chosen as extrapolations of pyrotheres. I assumed that once a society mastered one big domesticate which was useful but potentially limited, they'd be amenable and very adept at recruiting a second, particularly if the second had significantly different strengths. In our time line, we have precedent with Oxen & Horse, Horse & Camels, and Elephants & Everything else. Also, slightly limited, Oxen & Goats (in some areas goats were used as draft animals, despite being smaller and less powerful than other draft animals). It should be noted that Mothbeast domestication follows thousands of years after Sloth domestication. Of course, no one knows anything about Astropothere social organization or behavioural traits, so its basically a wild stab in the dark Liptoterns I assumed would drift into deer/antelope niches. Marsupials would be low end herbivores. So I didn't see lots of domestication potential. Astropotheres might be analogous to Water Buffalo (domesticable) or Moose (semi-dometicable) or Hippos (non-domesticable). So who knows with Astropotheres. If there is a domestication there, its going to come very late and be geographically restricted. The Yag had the best shot, but their Astropothere populations were too migratory. The Lake Vos culture might make a go of it, if there's a competitive advantage over Shaghui or Mothbeasts. Haven't decided. But it'll probably be relatively low significance. Hive Monkeys were the biggest leap because there's no real precedent. Primates in our world are extremely intelligent and social, but none of them have ever had a really useful set of behavioural traits that could be adapted to domestication. But placing monkeys in Antarctica, I had to give them behavioural traits to survive the winters, which amounts to hoarding and nesting. When humans, and particularly human agriculture comes along, those traits become irresistably useful. So domestication here becomes almost inevitable. As for Penguins, it struck me that their big problem as a species was safe breeding. Apart from that, they're highly social, very flexible free range critters. So they seemed a natural fit for domestication through providing controlled safe breeding. I tend to regard this development as almost inevitable. Domestication of the Hopper and Devil marsupial predators is pretty much analogous to dogs and cats, no more complicated than that. ---- The few quotes of the post-contact period imply that Captain Cook's expedition came to a very bad end, but that the natives of Antarctica became fairly well-known to the outside world during the 19th century, with what sounds like imperial conquest or at least major raids against parts of South America in the second half of the 19th century. With this, the last quote from Wells seems very surprising, since it implies that both the military prowess and the ruthless cruelty of Antarctic civilizations comes as a complete surprise to the British (and presumably other Europeans) around 1900 - I would have thought that the Europeans would already be aware of both traits, even if they underestimated them. - Underestimating is the key here. Tsalal societies in the 19th century do expand, into Patagonia, Western Australia, South West Africa, and there's conflict as well as trade, so they're not completely unknown. On the other hand, they're not well understood, the military significance of Tsalal rocketry is completely unappreciated, and the Europeans have had a century of bringing every other continent and culture to heel, and the notion of non-European nations invading Europe directly is near unthinkable.